Without a Leader

This is a disaster. A disaster of the entire leftist movement. It should be noted that current elections of 2003 resemble those of 1996. Similar to 1996, Zyuganov deliberately lost the elections. However, consequences of recent elections appear to be far more dramatic for those who attempted to escape poverty in the last decade. Actually, Kremlin is not happy with the current situation either.
One could draw the following conclusion. The government no longer has a powerful ideological rival. There is nothing left to prove to anybody. There no longer remains a stimulus for further development. A chance for approaching stagnation is obvious. Another important fact is that today's government opposition forces will need a long time to recover fully. This ultimately means that Vladimir Putin will have no equal competitor from the leftist bloc who is capable of governing the entire country as opposed to governing his own party in the upcoming presidential elections. One might term those upcoming events differently. However, this could in no way be called an election of the country's new leader.   
Therefore, the best thing that leftists can do today is simply have some rest. They can also ponder how it happened that millions of like-minded persons across Russia are completely unable move their representatives into government authorities.
There exist several obvious reasons of what happened. Firstly and most importantly, the government's main opposition (communist party) KPRF behaved similar to an elephant in a ceramics store. It pushed aside all of its ideologically closest parties. Some of those smaller parties ended up under Zyoganov's wing, while others were pushed to the marginal outskirts. This somewhat resembles one historical fact. "Stalin's USSR bloc", which acquired about 5,6% of votes was unable to make it to the government's powerful sphere. He did not participate in elections ever since…  
Secondly, KPRF suffers from "parliamentary" impotency. The party has actually never used all of its fighting techniques in order to protect its ideas. Remember that after Seleznev's exclusion from the party along with Goryacheva, Gubenko and so on, the government mostly feared KPRF's refusal to work in the parliament. This  was mostly due to communist morale advantage at the time. 
Finally, recent elections to the State Duma produced an additional result. Even those voters who are sympathetic to communists have noticed leftist leaders' artificial behavior. Nobody seemed surprised to learn about presence of people of abundant wealth in the communist party. Instead, another factor appeared to be of interest. Taking into account the fact that it costs about 1,5-2 million USD to appear on the "list" in order to get into the government, the money is nowhere to find. So, where is the money?
KPRF's pre-election budget did not increase much in comparison to previous elections. Therefore, the party's chance to win did not increase either. Today, there remains only one question: where did the money go? Neither one of the parties seem to have it.
"Pravda.Ru" invites its readers to collaborate on such an exciting topic. Otherwise, we will never be able to gain understanding of what should be done next.
One more thing. We offer to start a debate between those who are willing to get into the leader's seat. We will gladly provide space in our newspaper for such postings. Leftists must revive and stop their stagnation that happened due to Zyuganov's ambitions.
Your suggestions are welcomed.  

Vadim Gorshenin
Pravda.Ru